Transforming the exterior of a dollhouse is super exciting but, as I found out, it can take a long time and be expensive too. I decided to repaint the exterior of my dollhouse and ended up spending over £40 on paint and spending nearly 15 hours doing it. As I’ve made plenty of mistakes renovating the exterior of my dollhouse, I wanted to share all the things I learnt in the process, so your dollhouse exterior makeover will be easier and cheaper than mine was!
The main options for decorating a dollhouse exterior are paper, such as brick pattern wallpaper, or paint. Spray paint is the easiest way to paint a dollhouse exterior, but if you’re using certain paints, such as chalk paint, you’ll need to finish it with a protective coat to prevent it cracking.
Below I share your options for decorating your dollhouse exterior and talk you through what went right (and wrong!) when I gave the outside of my dollhouse a makeover.
Materials for decorating dollhouse exterior
Brick and stone wallpaper for dollhouse exteriors
Brick and stone paper is wallpaper with a brick or stone pattern on it. It’s available from dollhouse specialists and model shops and there are hundreds of different styles available.
From what I found, it’s tricker to find any scales other than 1:12, so if you’re decorating a smaller or larger dollhouse, you may need to check out Etsy, as some sellers on there sell different scales. Wallpapers on Etsy are usually downloadable and printable, so may only be an option if you have a high quality printer. If you buy from a dollhouse specialist, the wallpapers are usually sent as a sheet of approximately A3 size, but sizes do vary so make sure you check before you order.
To see what these wallpapers were like, I bought a sheet of old red brick paper from Melody Jane and the quality and size were great considering it only coat £1.99 a sheet.
A downside of brick paper is that it can easily tear, so if you’re making-over a dollhouse for a child, you might be better off choosing paint. Compared to printable wallpaper (which tends to cost at least £5 per download, not including the cost of ink), it’s much better value to paint a dollhouse instead of wallpapering it.
Although I originally planned to use brick paper to cover the exterior of my dollhouse, I decided not to use it as it’s a big dollhouse and it would have looked a bit much to have the whole house covered in brick. Plus I didn’t fancy having to line up the wallpaper sheets and cut them correctly around the doors. Painting seemed a much easier option, so I opted to spray paint the outside of the house to make the job quicker and to get a more even, stroke-free finish than painting it with a brush.
Wooden cladding/siding for dollhouse exteriors
I love shiplap cladding (also known as siding) and originally I wanted this for my dollhouse as the house has an American east coast look about it. I tried to make my own cladding wallpaper in Canva but it was impossible to line up the planks. The alternatives on Etsy were downloadable and printable and my printer is good enough for wallpaper hidden on the back wall of a dollhouse, but not for wallpaper in full view on a dollhouse exterior!
Since completing the exterior of my dollhouse, I have found a company that sells wooden shiplap, but at £1.45 a strip it could get expensive to clad a large dollhouse. Also the thought of cutting the strips down to size and fitting them around the window frames is a bit intimidating!
Another option is DIY shiplap using dollhouse wooden flooring, like in this video below, although you could probably use sheets of veneer cut to size or even lolly sticks as siding instead.
Paint for dollhouse exteriors
The main options for painting the exterior of a dollhouse are spray paint or regular paint from a can, applied with a brush. Any type of paint will do, but I’d recommend avoiding paint with a glossy finish as the shiny finish can look a bit much on larger areas of wood.
I chose chalk finish furniture paint as I found this the easiest paint to gain even coverage from when I used it in the inside of the dollhouse. But really, any paint suitable for wood will work for the outside of a dollhouse.
The dollhouse was originally a very pale yellow colour and I felt like it needed updating, especially as I’d transformed the inside of the house. You can find out more about how I gave the inside of my dollhouse a makeover in the video below:
Below, I share how I transformed the exterior of my dollhouse.
How to paint a dollhouse exterior
Preparing the wood
Getting the exterior of your dollhouse ready for painting is the most important step in makeover process.
Before painting, you’ll need to:
- Remove anything you can from the exterior of your dollhouse, including door frames, window frames, window boxes, shutters, balconies – basically, anything you can take off, take off!
- Cover anything you can’t remove with lots of masking tape.
- If you can take the front doors off the dollhouse then this will make painting them much easier, as you’ll be able to lay them flat and you won’t have to worry about accidentally spray painting the dollhouse interior through the windows.
- Sand down the wood to take the top layer of old paint off, this will help ensure the new paint adheres better to the wood.
- Thoroughly clean any sandpaper grit off the paint surface and let the wood dry completely.
I originally put masking tape over the door, windows and balconies, but quickly realised that this wasn’t going to do much to protect against spray paint, as there’s no way of covering every little bit of wood. After my first spray paint attempt in the wrong colour (more on this below), the spray paint managed to get through to the frames so I chose a more drastic approach.
I used a hammer and wallpaper scraper to remove the frames from the dollhouse and as they were only attached with wood glue, this was pretty easy to do and was way quicker and neater than masking all the frames. It was really easy to glue them back on with UHU glue once I’d finished painting.
In the image above, I masked up the windows where I’d removed the frames so I didn’t accidentally spray paint the inside of the dollhouse. Note the festive happy birthday napkins I used to cover the roof shingles!
Choosing the paint colour and type
Can you spray paint a dollhouse?
Spray paint is a great choice for renovating the exterior of a dollhouse as it’s easy to get even coverage, something that can be tricky when using paint and a brush. Using spray paint avoids brush strokes and is quicker than using a brush. The main downside of spray painting a dollhouse is that it can be messy, so cover the surface you’re working on with newspaper, wear a mask and gloves and use the paint outside.
The best technique is to give the can a good shake for at least a minute once the mixing ball inside the can starts rattling (this will make your arm ache!) Then be bold and spray in continuous lines back and forth, holding the can about 30cm from the dollhouse.
If you’ve used any paint as an undercoat then make sure this is completely dry before applying spray paint. I tried to spray chalk finish paint on top of a layer of multipurpose paint but the paint beneath wasn’t totally dry. As soon as I applied the chalk paint, it cracked and the paint underneath showed through. I then had to wait until the top layer was dry, sand it off so the cracks were smooth and then spray again!
Finally, spray paint can get everywhere thanks to something called ‘spray drift’. This is when excess paint particles that don’t settle onto the wood create a kind of paint dust that will coat everything near what you are painting, as well as the dollhouse itself! My dollhouse was covered in pink dust, as was the table, the table covering, my clothes and hands. My advice is to cover as much as possible and spray paint outside.
Once the paint is fully dry, wipe the surface of the inside and outside of your dollhouse with a damp cloth to remove the paint dust (believe me, the spray drift will be everywhere!)
It took a whole 400ml can of spray paint to cover the entire house, but I bought a small can of the same colour (China Rose chalky finish from Rust-Oleum) to do any touch-ups near the balconies and also to cover any patches I’d missed. The spray can of paint cost £11.50 from Homebase but I’ve spotted it on Amazon at £10.71 so it’s worth buying online if you don’t have to pay for delivery.
Choosing the right colour paint for your dollhouse exterior
I didn’t have a definite colour in mind when I went shopping for paint and this was my first, of many, mistakes with this renovation. At first I bought a can of Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch multipurpose paint in Straw Flower as the colour on the can looked similar to the original colour but a bit brighter. But, paint colours can be deceptive and when I sprayed it on, it was really dark and made the front of the dollhouse look very gloomy.
To avoid an expensive mistake like this, you could buy a tester pot of the paint you plan to use, but this will depend on the type of paint you want. Standard emulsion testers can cost as little as £1.50 but more specialist paints, such as chalk furniture paint, don’t usually have tester pots and the smallest size is around 125ml for £5.50, so it could get expensive if you buy a few of these to test out the colour.
If you can’t find a tester pot, grab some colour swatches, these are the little strips of card with different colours on that you can get from most DIY and paint shops, or online. If I’d have done this, I could have saved myself £11.50 on a can of spray paint, but I did end up using this paint for the door and windows so it wasn’t a total waste of cash!
In the end I settled for spray can of Rust-Oleum Chalky Finish Furniture Paint in China Rose (you can buy it here from Amazon), which looked like a very pale pink colour. In the end, this turned out to be way pinker than I thought, and I wasn’t 100% happy but this was about 8 hours into the project and there was no way I was repainting it a different colour!
Painting dollhouse windows, doors and balconies
My Exmouth dollhouse has beautiful balconies that were originally painted white and blue, I bought some Rust-Oleum Satin Finish Furniture paint in teal to redo these. I meant to buy chalk finish paint but instead bought satin finish as I didn’t read the label properly. My top tip here would be go paint shopping when you have the time and energy to actually read what’s on the paint cans!
The satin finish paint is much shinier than the chalk finish paint I used on the walls of the dollhouse and again, I wasn’t totally happy with the finish as I think it would have looked better if the balconies and walls had the same matte finish.
Painting dollhouse balconies is the epitome of a faffy job, so if you can remove them to paint them then definitely do. I couldn’t remove mine as they were nailed in, so the best I could do was to put masking tape on the walls next to the balconies and try not to flick too much paint about as I was painting them. I couldn’t reach a lot of the back of the balcony spindles, even when I tried to paint them through the windows, but I got as much as I could done and they look good enough.
I removed the windows and door frames and originally planned to paint these the same colour teal as the balconies. But by this point I was feeling pretty fed-up with the whole makeover process so I decided to spray paint them instead as it would be quicker and easier than painting them with a brush.
I put down lots of newspaper and laid the frames flat before spraying them. I didn’t put enough newspaper down though and ended up spray painting our dining table too – although this was easily removed with some white spirit! I didn’t bother sanding the frames first, I just gave them a good clean and did a spray test on one and the paint held really well so I then spray painted the rest.
Once they’d dried, I reattached the door and window frames with UHU glue, this was easy to do as the frames slot into the window holes so I didn’t need to worry about lining them up or making sure they were straight.
I then reattached the main doors, with the help of Neil (my model-making father-in-law) who fitted some new hinges to one of the doors for me – these had snapped off when I first got the dollhouse.
Here are some close-up shots of the new paint work.
Here’s the final before and after of this epic dollhouse makeover!
I learnt so much re-doing the outside of my dollhouse and although I didn’t love the new finish initially, I now quite like the candy coloured paintwork. Most importantly though, my six year old daughter loves it and has given it her full approval!